You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This HaBO is short and sweet, and it’s from Rachel, who is looking for a historical she read. She remembers one key scene:
Hello! I’m looking for a historical romance novel, possibly highland based. Anyway, all I can seem to freaking remember is the lead female is a healer (of course), and somehow gets hooked up with this big burly guy.
Anyway, the only part I’m able to remember specifically about this book is: lead male gets drunk, him and lead female end up in bed, nothing happens because he passes out, but for some reason she wants him to think he deflowered her (maybe they’re married? My memory fails).
So she mixes up some herbal concoction that resembles blood, but pours too much on the sheets and when he wakes up he’s all ashamed of himself and thinks he hurts her. I don’t think she tells him for quite awhile what she did – maybe not until they actually get down.
It’s driving me crazy that I can’t remember the book. Thanks!
Ok, thinking about the potential comedy of this scene has me in stitches. Like, he wakes up and there is all this dark brown red all over the place, and so his first thought would be they were filming a horror movie in their sleep except horror movies and the film industry hadn’t been invented yet so that’s not right and SWEET JESUS on a CRACKER is that her LIVER? In the BED? What did they DO LAST NIGHT?!
Ahem. Pardon that trip through a small portion of my very silly brain.
Do you recognize this book?
I have totally read this one…and have absolutely no idea what it is
I’ve read this several times, I swear! I want to say it’s an Amanda Quick? Maybe the one with Emily and Simon (I can never remember her titles, they’re all one word like Dangerous, Deception and Ravished).
Defy not the Heart by Johanna Lindsay has the fake blood mishap. She’s not a healer, though.
I’ve read this too. They’re married and he’s supposed to deflower her so she mixes up the blood stuff. I think its…either medieval or Regency. She later confesses and he’s furious at her. Does any of that sound familiar OP?
Defy not the heart is what I was thinking of.
I know Amanda Quick has one where they do the fake blood for the wedding night, but I think in that one, the hero’s awake and she pours too much because half the town seems to have given her vials of blood. (Desire, maybe?)
Yes, that’s the one! I don’t know where I got Amanda Quick from. I think one of her books had a medival setting with a similar scenario, but not quite like this one.
Amanda Quick has more than one book with a similar scene — the one in her Desire matches the remembered scene best, but the heroine uses vials of chicken blood to stain the sheets instead of the remembered herbs (although that heroine is also a perfumist, so maybe that’s why it’s in your memory?).
Mystique is also a historical with a potions/herbs subplot, although I don’t remember if it’s a good match beyond that.
The Emily/Simon one is Scandal, although it’s a regency instead of a historical.
Sheet-staining was also a part of Johanna Linsey’s Defy Not the Heart (no healer, actually hymeneal blood, drunk groom, horrified ‘did I murder you?’ the morning after) and I think also in Elizabeth Lowell’s Enchanted (bride stabbed groom on their wedding night, groom played it off as a joke).
This totally sounds like something Lyndsay Sands would put in one of her historicals. Part of this description reminded me of the wedding night scene that opened the book Always, but not all the pieces fit (I don’t recall the hero being drunk and I can’t remember now if the heroine knew anything about herbs/healing/etc.). But, you know, just another author name to toss into the mix.
It sounds a lot like Sarah MacLean’s “No Duke Goes Unpunished”. She uses fake blood to make it seem likes she’s been ‘ruined’. Instead she uses too much and everyone thinks he killed her. It was pretty good read. Hope that helps.
I am also with Tamika. It might be No Good Duke Goes Unpunished. She is looking for someone to ruin her because she is about to be married to a man she doesn’t love and picks a random guy at a pub (who is very drunk) to trick with it. But she uses too much, disappears, and everyone thinks he killed her. And then it turns out he is the son of the man she was supposed to marry and everyone thinks he killed her for years until she shows up at said (now) Duke’s club and asks for help with her brother (?). Anyway, the book is really good even if it isn’t the one you’re looking for.
Yes, that’s the Amanda Quick’s Seduction! The same one with the two women who almost get into a duel (although neither one is bare-breasted.)
Is is bad that I can think of like a dozen books with “vials of chicken blood”? Why is it always chicken blood anyway – I’ve always wondered that.
This sounds like an Amanda Quick I recently re-read. I don’t think it is one that I have seen mentioned yet. Seduction, she’s a healer who isn’t entirely sure she wants to get married, so she works a deal that he will wait and promise not to seduce her. He gets pushy and eventually get drunk and aggressive, so she drugs him so he’ll pass out, them she mixes tea with herbs to fake the blood, she uses way too much and so he thinks he really hurt her.
I am almost positive this is a Lynsay Sands books. I think it’s either Taming the Highland Bride or possibly The Hellion and the Highlander. I know I have both on audio so I may have to try to listen to them again because it will bug me until I figure it out.
I was thinking it was Taming the Highland Bride by Lynsay Sands but after skimming it on Scribd, it’s similar but not exact. In in the husband passes out drunk on the wedding night and the bride decides to cut herself to smear blood on the bed. However, she keeps thinking she needs more and ends up with a pretty bad cut on her thigh and a lot of blood on the sheet. Her husband feels really guilty after seeing the blood assuming he hurt her badly and can’t remember it. I’m pretty sure the heroine isn’t a healer though. The cut on her thigh was pretty bad and she didn’t seem to do anything about healing it.
Until all of these comments, I don’t think I realized how often I have seen this. I’m pretty sure I’ve read all of these books.
Individually.
And Historicals aren’t even really my thing.
This is a Stephanie Laurens book. The original Cynster novels – this book features Devil’s brother Richard? I believe this is book 3 Scandal’s Bride where he inherits some castle or some such. The heroine Catriona is a healer / lady of the vale and she gets a vision that she needs a baby… There’s a lot of witchy stuff and the suspicion of a murder Etc etc
Haha I want to add that definitely all the books mentioned above might have used such a scene but the healer and isolated setting took me straight to S. Laurens. Good luck sorting it out!
Thank you all! I think it’s Seduction, by Amanda Quick. That sounds right, and since I’m not familiar with most of the other authors, I’m going to run with it. But I’m seriously laughing so hard at all these book descriptions. Who knew there were so many novels involving fake blood for trickery purposes in the bedroom! Definitely going to check some of these out.
Thanks again!
Yeah, I know I’ve read it (and it’s been used several times in other books), but I can see this one in my head. It was definitely not a recent book, probably medieval (at least had a castle), so I doubt it’s one of Lynsay Sands newer ones, if it was her.
So I would definitely think it would be an Amanda Quick novel.
Loved all the descriptions too – though in a way they’re deeply upsetting. The blood thing MIGHT work for faking virginity of an experienced heroine. But are all of these virgin heroines SO innocent they don’t realize that to convincingly fake intercourse you’d need not only a SMALL amount of blood but also some other fluid to resemble…errr, the other fluid usually present in these situations? Also, seriously, whoever does these puppies’ laundry hates them. Getting blood out of fabric without oxyclean once it’s dried is no joke.
@mook- In Scandal’s Bride, she drugs him and adds an aphrodisiac to his whiskey as she has had a vision of a child with Scandal- she is an active participant in the froliking in the bed- I just finished it, which is why im all over it-
Wow sooo much blood, fake blood, and general shenanigans. Definitely looking up these books.
@Rebecca. Agreed. I enjoyed the comments, but the virginal-intercourse-plus-buckets-o-blood is a pretty disturbing plot device when you think it through. In some historicals, heroines get routinely ruined just by being unchaperoned in the presence of our rakish and virile hero. So why would a heroine be motivated to work so hard to convince others that the marriage is consummated? If she’s violet-eyed and comely, and he’s a manwhore, and everyone in the manor/castle/ton knows they shared a bed on their wedding night, I see no need to examine the bedclothes for evidence, gross, who does that?
@Rebecca, yeah, I think that’s part of the thing, that they are so naive that they wouldn’t know flip about it. Some of them though are relatively sly and mocking of the history, about it all. Like Quick’s Desire, practically the whole village gives her vials of blood, many with a comment about how common their use is, and she did know the proper procedure, and made a mess of it because of a fit of temper. Also, in many of the books this trope features in, they aren’t trying to get the blood out, they hang it out in public for everyone to see. Jokes abound in that too, whether from a sly angle or one of naivety. For instance Lynsay Sands’ The Deed (hilarious book BTW) the heroine was so naive that she didn’t understand why her first husband cut himself and wiped blood on the sheet, and she figured they hung the sheet up because the men were fools and thought that airing it out would help take the blood out.
@Amy – I think the fuzzy motivations here have to do with mixing time periods. Regency to some extent and much more so in Victorian England (or associated commonwealth colonies/offshoots) you get the concern about girls being “ruined.” There you’d use blood to FAKE virginity. (There’s a funny/awful version of this in Persepolis which is supposedly NON fiction, which is what keeps it from just being funny.) But then you have a heroine who presumably knows what’s going on.
In the middle ages up through about the eighteenth century on the other hand, marriage was a legally binding contract, and consummation was the equivalent of a notarized signature. People general watched (or at least listened) to high stakes wedding nights (where a lot of money was at stake) and checking for physical evidence afterward had nothing to do with the lady’s reputation and everything to do with making sure that the property transfer was fully legal and valid. A bit mercenary, but not really fetishizing virginity, and something a heroine might well do if (for example) her marriage contract stated that her husband was obligated to pay down the mortgage on her lands once they were fully legally married. In a lower social class, a consummated marriage also removed grounds for legal annulment of the marriage, meaning a woman who could prove that her marriage had been consummated after the fact (via sheets or otherwise) could sue her husband for abandonment and force him to pay to support her if he walked out, whereas if he claimed the marriage had never been consummated he had no legal responsibility. Again, a destitute heroine who’d seen her father walk out (for example) might try that trick thinking it was insurance against being left penniless. Plenty of situations that don’t involve her being an implausibly wide eyed dope. (Virgin=completely ignorant and needs a man to explain her own body to her is one of my pet peeves.)
Actually, thinking about this more, the novel that alerted teenage me to the potential for semen as well as blood stained sheets was written by a man -Souls and Bodies by David Lodge, where a virginal young couple have their first real post honeymoon fight over the wife running up a huge laundry bill because their sheets are getting a lot of use. Always good to read from the point of view of both sexes.
I definitely read this one a while ago – but I can’t remember the name either.